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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: October 3rd, 2025

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  • An account number is a unique number that is associated to your account. That IS an ID.

    You have that number → you can find the person.

    That is an ID. Even if you call it banana shake and say “bro, trust me this is not an ID”. It is still an ID: a piece of information in a domain that uniquely maps to elements in a co-domain, being the later, the set of persons in this country with a SSN.

    Under your logic, a rifle stops being a rifle if it has a sticker that says “not valid as a rifle”



  • Being an ID and being proof of citizenship are two orthogonal ideas.

    The SSN is the former, but not the latter.

    The sentence “an ID to proof your citizenship” is misconstructed.

    IDs and Proofs of something are both subclasses of “documents”. The correct phrase would be: “a document to prove citizenship”.

    That document could (in principle) not identify you, but at the same time demonstrate that you are a citizen (for example, you could have a long cryptographic self-validated number that hashes to a “Yes”, or “Invalid”). But of course that’s not too practical.





  • I once hard (here) that people in USA is kind of against having an ID document.

    It ended up anyway giving them one of the crappiest IDs in any country: SSNs

    to answer your questions: it is super cheap (~5 US dollars), fast, has many security systems, it is quickly verifyable agains government databases, it has a photo, your signature, and, if valid, nobody will question it.

    It looks like a mini version of the plastic card in mdern pastports (of the size of a credit card)

    The police can stop you and without probable cause ask you for your ID (and car/driving documents if in a car), check it against the national database, and give it back to you. You have to show it (required by law) and it is your responsibility (if you are over 18) to keep it with you. The intention is to catch people with pending charges or arrest orders and stuff. If you are not hiding from the law, it is a simple, civilized interaction that would take you 2~5 mins.

    You know, the kind of things that you would expect from a 3rd world country, less developed than USA.